WISE Score
A college student with a failing body tries to squeeze a lifetime of romance and family drama into one final summer in Mallorca.
The Last Sunrise is a heavy-hitter in the 'tragic romance' subgenre, but it swaps the usual high school setting for a more mature college-aged perspective. It’s essentially a beautiful travelogue interrupted by a medical crisis and a soap-opera's worth of family baggage.
If you’re looking for a light summer flick, keep moving. This is for the parent and teen who want to have a good cry over a well-acted, emotionally draining story about the cost of keeping secrets while the clock is ticking.
This is firmly for older teens and adults. Between the 17+ rating and the heavy focus on mortality and medical decline, it’s too intense for the middle-school crowd.
The mother-daughter bond and the focus on 'living in the moment' are strong, though the hidden family secrets likely inject significant conflict.
It follows a fairly standard 'last summer' romantic drama template. The Mallorca setting adds visual flair, but the narrative beats feel familiar.
Common Sense Media marks this as age 17+, which usually signals significant sexual content, heavy language, or intense emotional distress related to the illness.
Excellent for building empathy regarding chronic illness and the complexities of end-of-life choices or severe health decline.
We’ve seen the 'dying teen' trope done to death (pun intended), but The Last Sunrise attempts to elevate the genre by aging up the protagonists. By making Ry a college student, the movie moves away from the 'first love' innocence of The Fault in Our Stars and into more complex territory involving autonomy, adult medical decisions, and the realization that your parents are flawed human beings with their own messy histories.
The setting isn't just window dressing. Mallorca serves as a stark, sun-drenched contrast to the sterile medical reality Ry is trying to escape. The cinematography leans heavily into the 'blue-and-gold' aesthetic of the Mediterranean, which makes the eventual downturn in Ry's health feel even more claustrophobic.
Don't ignore that age signal. Most movies in this genre aim for a PG-13 to capture the widest possible audience of crying teenagers. The fact that this pushed into 17+ territory suggests a level of honesty—or perhaps just explicit content—that sets it apart. It handles romance with a level of maturity that might be uncomfortable for younger viewers but will likely resonate with older ones who find the 'YA' version of these stories too sanitized.
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